I’m really loving this site that I found today, it’s high resolution art album for really picky people like myself. Beautiful high quality scans, carefully retouched and colour corrected. So far it’s the best album art I’ve found, and I’ve been looking for a while. My FLAC’s and MP3′s are now looking better than ever.
Archive for the ‘iPod’ Category
High Quality Album Art
Saturday, June 21st, 2008MP3 Repacker
Sunday, June 15th, 2008I’ve been working with MP3 stuff for over 10 years now, so it’s not often you come across a new program or utility you hadn’t heard of before. However I found something new today, possibly because I hadn’t thought to look for something like this before. It’s a program that processes 320 CBR files and makes them smaller VBR files losslessly by reducing the frame-sizes where they have just padding (the data doesn’t fill the whole 320). Visit this Hydrogenaudio Thread for more.
iPod Touch Keyboard Tip
Friday, May 30th, 2008Quite often the iPod’s autocompletion gets the word wrong, requiring you to move your finger way up the screen to click the cancel button. This is a real hassle and breaks the flow of typing.
However I’ve found an easier way, I have two languages installed and hence have the change language button to the left of the spacebar, which you click to toggle between languages. Double tapping it turns out to be an effective and conveniently located cancel suggestion button 
iTunes 7.5 Watched Folders / Folder Sync (That Doesn't Suck)
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007As a long time WinAmp user and iPod owner, one of the many things that annoys me is its inability to sync to a folder or folders. I only use iTunes for managing my iPods, and a number of other programs for working with my video and music collection. I’ve tried various utilities in the past, most require a 50mb .NET Framework download and seem to break with every new iTunes version. So after hearing about the iTunes SDK, and that you could work with it via Windows Scripting Host in JavaScript (a language I know very well), I decided to write my own. The nice thing about using the COM interface is you’ve telling iTunes to work with its database on your behalf, so the script won’t break when iTunes 8 is released for example. Oh and my script is only 12KB.
The goals for the my sync script were to: Add any new files that weren’t in the iTunes database, remove any that were missing* and check if the MP4 or iD3 tags in the files have been updated (with Tag&Rename or Atomic Parsley for example) and make the necessary updates in iTunes. Some of my media is on external drives, video especially, so if the base folder for a certain media type is offline the script doesn’t remove any missing media files of that type. When the drive with these files is reconnected everything will still work correctly in iTunes.
Currently the script has base folders for Music, Films and TV Shows (music videos are treated as normal music files). The script looks for files directly inside these folders and in subfolders one level deep. It checks files of extensions .mp3, .mp4, .m4a and .m4v. If you need something other than this setup, feel free to modify the script as necessary, but please don’t ask me to make changes as I really don’t have the time and this is how my library is setup. The code is well commented enough to be a good starting point for making your own script though.
When you run it a dialog will appear with your current base folders (these are stored in HKCU in the registry). Clicking YES will proceed with the folders displayed, NO will prompt you for folders and then proceed, and CANCEL will exit without doing anything. The script will start iTunes if it isn’t running and start checking, there’s no progress display (sorry I don’t think this is possible with WSH) and will take about 30 seconds on most libraries (mine has 8000 items and averages about that), it will display a dialog with changes made when complete. If it finds a large number of items to add, it will prompt you with a dialog prior to this with a time estimate and ask whether you wish to proceed with the add operation. The script only modifies the iTunes database, it makes no changes to the actual media files themselves.
Notes: For files were the tags have been updated outside iTunes, things like Play Counts etc are preserved. You can also just press ENTER on the main dialog to proceed.
Please email me if you’d like a copy of this…
LAME + EAC Settings
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
UPDATED 2008-03-07: Removed genre from tagging since the one supplied by FreeDB is usually wrong anyway.
These are the LAME settings I’m using in EAC, configured to use LAME as a custom encoder. See this Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase page for further info.
-V 0 –vbr-new –id3v2-only –pad-id3v2 –ta “%a” –tt “%t” –tl “%g” –ty “%y” –tn “%n” –ignore-tag-errors %s %d
eMusic & Spam
Wednesday, July 4th, 2007Interesting this… when I signed up to eMusic I created an unique email address on one of my domains for the account. The only place I used this address was on the eMusic.com sign up form. Now I’m starting to receive spam on that address, and only on that address. After checking on the net, it appears they share their user database with anyone and everyone. Thank goodness I can just drop the address…
UPDATE: Oh and I just got another spam e-mail, and the To address just happened to contain the 2 unique addresses I had used to sign up to Emusic with (I cancelled and tried it again about 18 months later). Coincidence I think not!!
iTunes Library Updater
Friday, March 9th, 2007This utility solves one my biggest annoyances with iTunes, it can’t sync its library to a folder on my computer (like WinAmp does). I use external tools for tagging/organising my music, and hence things get renamed, added and moved around outside of iTunes causing it to lose the plot—not anymore 
Step By Step Conversion Guide: Putting DVD's On To Your iPod (revised)
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
UPDATED: 22nd September 2007.
(MP4 Scripts updated September 17th 2007)
These settings/scripts will generate files of pretty much transparent quality to the original DVD. I’m using these settings for archival purposes, so if you’re looking for really small files, these might not be for you.
While I have previously written about this topic, I never covered it in any depth or went into every step I follow. When I first got my G5 iPod it was a steep learning curve figuring out MPEG video; what tools to use, what settings to use, what version of each software app was best, etc. to get the best possible quality and file size.
This post should serve as a complete answer to the question of “How do I get DVD’s onto my iPod that look good on both the iPod Screen, a TV at the smallest possible file size”. Below is the step by step process complete with illustrations and links to the required software.
New iPod Lovin'
Wednesday, February 15th, 2006
I’ve recently upgraded to a 60GB Video iPod from my ancient 2nd generation ipod, and am absolutely loving the thing. I’ve finally got ‘on-the-go’ playlists, shuffle songs that is actually random, and video functionality (which i hadn’t really considered) turned out to be pretty damn cool.
After purchasing the apple a/v cable, I’m in the progress of converting a huge amount of video that i’ll be able to watch anywhere. Well actually, i’ve converted some of it several dozen times so far. Finding the best encoder, codec, and settings turned out to be a little challenging, since i wanted pretty good quality on a TV *and* a reasonable file size—2500kbps was out of the question.
In the end i decided on ffmpeg (windows binaries) as the encoder with these settings:
Video
-vcodec xvid -s 512×384 -qscale 6 -g 300
The “xvid” codec turned out to produce much cleaner and smaller files than the “mpeg4″, and plays on the ipod fine. Depending on content, I’ve increased the quality a bit, levels 4 and 5 are a fair bit smoother though file size jumps up considerably—I’ve done some of my faster moving music videos at these levels.
Audio
-acodec aac -ac 2 -ar 32000 -ab 48 -async 1
High passing frequencies above 16kHz and lowering the bitrate saves a huge amount of space. TV shows especially could go even lower, however I’m using shure e3c’s and am quite sensitive to audio quality, and these were the lowest settings i was happy with. Incidentally, with the apple stock headphones 22050 & 32 or 40 was passable since they seem to roll off the top end anyway.
Misc
-f mp4
Makes sure the muxing is suitable for the ipod.
Once you’ve got the video converted, tagging it so the iPod sorts it nicely is another matter. iTunes [as of this writing] is completely unable to tag video files as TV Shows properly. It has a TV Shows setting, but it is ignored by the iPod. Fortunately there’s a tool called Atomic Parsley, which was originally just for the mac, but windows as well.
One thing I’ve found really handy to do with my video tagging, is to put “Videos” in to the “Album” field for all my videos; movies, music and tv shows. The reason is iTunes treats videos just like songs and finding a handful of videos intermixed with them is a pain. With the album set to videos, you can just type “videos” in the search field to list all the videos on your iPod—sweet.
Here is an example of Atomic Parsley config I use, for a TV show:
–genre “TV Shows” –stik “TV Show” –artist “Seinfeld” –album “Videos” –year 1989 –TVShowName “Seinfeld” –TVEpisode “The Seinfeld Chronicles” –TVEpisodeNum 1 –TVSeasonNum 1 –title “The Seinfeld Chronicles” –writeBack
To get the video off your DVD’s the best tool is DVD Decrypter, you’ll have to google search for it as Macrovision (the makers of DVD encryption) under threat of lawsuit made them take the site down and remove the software. The last version was 3.5.4, and make sure you uncheck the “Check for Program Updates” under Settings > Events.
From the UI you can’t extract more than one episode at a time in IFO mode (the mode you want to be using). However, from the console it’s possible to write a batch script to extract them one after the other. Just add one line for each PGC with the switches below:
/MODE IFO /DEST F:\VIDEOS /VTS 1 /PGC 1 /START /CLOSE /SPLIT NONE /DIRECT 0×80 0xE0 /NAMING PGC
In closing, having all my video with my me is just as cool as having all my music. iPod’s just seem to get better and better!
UPDATE: The information above has been superseded, please see the more recent post entitled: Step By Step Guide: Putting DVD’s On To Your iPod
Shitty MP3's Must Die!
Monday, May 9th, 2005
With my next overseas trip just over a week away, I’m in the final mad rush to get everything ready, including breaking in my new Shure e3c Noise Isolating Earphones. These are the in ear canal style units that musicians use, and I have to say the sound quality and detail is quite extraordinary!
I used Sony active noise canceling headphones on my last trip. They helped a lot in reducing the aircraft engine noise, but were quite bulky, only worked on low/mid frequencies and need batteries. The Shure ones on the other-hand block about 25dB across all frequencies (the noise-canceling ones were 10dB) and are very compact, which will help my carry-on baggage only plan for this trip.
They take about a week to properly mold to your ear canal (or your ear canal to mold to the earphones as the case maybe, lol) and break-in the speaker drivers. We’re at day 3 now and they’re definitely getting more comfortable to wear—and the sound quality still blows me away!
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